Monthly Archives: November 2011

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I am more outraged and truly sickened by what the police did in Davis than anything I have seen or experienced since the Civil Rights movement and the hoses, clubs and dogs loosed on people who only wanted to be treated as people.

We applaud the brave Egyptians taking to the streets and risking their lives for freedom. We argue that the Syrians should not kill their own people who simply want freedom. We fought for the right of the Libyans to overthrow their long-time monster in residence. We feel for the people of Yemen and Bahrain who demonstrate against their governments. We are very assertive in protecting people in other nations from violent overreaction of police. We decry the beating and gassing of demonstrators–peaceful and not so peaceful–as long as it isn’t here.

When demonstrators here camp out, we complain that they’re ruining the lawn at City Hall. Hmmm–as against the joblessness and foreclosures that are ruining not their lawns but their lives. When Occupy Wall Street people start to make noise or smell bad or get in the way of commerce, our government, local and federal, has to clear them out for public safety. And what advances public safety more than batons, shields, tear gas and pepper spray?

Peaceful demonstrations are disruptive. They’re supposed to be. I understand why governments don’t want them. But historically, in our cities and at our universities, we have tolerated peaceful demonstrations–even when inconvenient.

I do understand how, when a demonstration turns violent–as sometimes happens, (sometimes naturally, sometimes provoked by anarchists and sometimes from government infiltrators) the police can overreact. I have some sympathy for the police feeling outnumbered, frightened and angry. Civil disobedience is not always, well, civil. While I do not condone police riots–and I’ve seen them, both here and abroad–I understand the passions and adrenalin of the moment. I get, though obviously don’t approve of, Kent State and National Guardsmen shooting unarmed students. In LA’s own May Day Melee the cops went berserk and just started swinging at everyone and couldn’t, in the heat of the moment, discern a mother with a baby from a gangbanger, a merchant from a newscaster or journalist. I get rage.

What I don’t get, and what is so chilling to me about the pepper spraying of peaceful, non-threatening students at Davis, was the cold-bloodedness of it all. We see seated students without clubs, rocks or bottles. We see a lot of police standing around and we see a cop calmly, coolly, walking back and forth spraying the students with pepper spray–a spray that is forbidden to our own military in foreign lands. But it is fine to pour out all over young people seated on the pavement.

What I didn’t see was any rage on the part of the police. What I didn’t see was any fear or panic. I saw only a cop doing his job without any interference from his fellow officers. I’m sure, they thought this was all very “professional.” It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t angry. They weren’t out of control. And that’s what so disturbs me. They might as well have been spraying a lawn to get rid of bugs. But people are not bugs. Those Davis cops were, without either passion or pity, only following orders. Like the cops in the south, they didn’t see the humanity in the demonstrators. Chilling.
2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

The charges that the Super Committee and Congress failed to act are patently false.Of course, they acted and are acting now. They are acting, as in pretending, that they are grown-ups. They are acting the parts of idealistic followers of the only philosophy that will save the nation. They are acting like they believe the words that come out their mouths and are reflected in their truly amazing press release:

“Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve. We remain hopeful that Congress can build on this committee’s work and can find a way to tackle this issue in a way that works for the American people and our economy.”

This is what therapists call “word salad.” This is self-contradictory cant that uses highfalutin language to pay lip service to high ideals and aspirations without a trace of either realism or sincerity. They couldn’t agree on anything–and this was outside the spotlight and obvious political pressures. The idea that, on their own, in the light of day and in the dark corners with special interest lobbyists, they will solve problems in a way that may be against their immediate political benefit is both nave and ludicrous.

They are acting like they put the fate of the nation above either their party or their own personal ambition. They are all acting–just not very convincingly.

There are a lot of complicated issues and ironies involved in the Pollard case.On the surface, it is as Gail Tzipporah Saunders says: He stole secrets and gave them to our ally Israel. Surely we should be able to discern the difference between giving away secrets that would be used to harm our interests, as against advancing them. He was not giving them to Syria or Egypt, nor to the Soviet Union (This is how old this case is. There was a Soviet Union back then). Further, Israel’s position is that intelligence sharing agreements between Israel and the United States, in their view, required the information be shared.

Then there is the terrible irony that if Pollard had made the intelligence available to the Soviet Union, he would be free today. You see when we arrest a Soviet spy or even a Russian spy, we know that they will reciprocate and arrest some American–either a real spy or just a patsy. They do this knowing that we will trade with them. The Soviets would have grabbed an American and we would have freed Pollard in exchange.

However, we know full well that our friend Israel would never arrest and hold hostage any American for the purposes of extortion or trade. Thus Israel Prime Ministers always call for Pollards release but have no trump card to play against us, their strongest ally.

What truly complicates this case however is the moral/immoral ambiguity of Pollard himself. You see he was not a pure idealist who felt compelled by loyalty to Israel or his duty to our intelligence sharing agreement with Israel. He accepted money in exchange for the information. This makes it far more difficult to make the moral case for him; it is tainted by at least the perception that it was done not on its merits but was meretricious.

Still, had he sold it to the Soviets he would be free–or as free as you get as a Jew in Russia. Oh, the ironies abound.
2011 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

The Free Jonathan Pollard movement is starting to sound as old as a drumbeat in the distance. But why shouldn’t Pollard, who was convicted of passing “secrets” along to Israel our ally be released?

As a naval intelligence officer, Pollard came across information that the State Department had that Syria, Iraq, Libya and Iran were developing nuclear and chemical weapons to use against Israel, so he did what any reasonable person would do; he passed the information along to the Israeli government that they were legally entitled to anyway.

After the story broke, he and his wife tried to seek asylum in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Although they were originally accepted, they were later turned away. Although it isn’t my style to publicly criticize Israel, I think the Israeli Embassy should have granted Pollard and his wife asylum rather than using them as pawns and hoisting them into the waiting arms of the FBI.

He was convicted of treason for passing along information to an ally and given a life sentence. Clinton was supposed to pardon him but reneged on his agreement. Yet George W. pardoned those convicted of embezzlement, income tax evasion and falsifying firearms records. Obama pardoned those convicted of offenses like selling drugs and moving stolen property across state lines, so you’d think someone could pardon Pollard for passing information along to an ally in the name of self-preservation. Besides, he is ill and needs to spend his dying days in peace rather than continue to be used as an example.

I called the White House and asked President Obama to pardon him and may send an email as well. Hoping you will do something, too.

If Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was not Justice Thomas but an ordinary Thomas he’d be behind bars. He is the ultra-conservative’s equivalent of the Mafia “Made Man.” The tag confers untouchability on the bearer. Thomas wears the tag for his rock solid ultra conservative views, his showcase value to cover GOP and Tea Party bigotry, and most importantly his knee jerk vote on the High Court against civil rights, civil liberties protections and to expand corporate power. A cursory checklist of Thomas’s financial manipulations, abuse, and duplicity, and outright illegality complete with the legal statues and codes that he’s violated confirm his made man tag, meaning hands off from investigators and prosecutors.
Thomas has received cash, gifts, and foundation donations totaling more than $2 million during the past decade. Since 2004 he has declared none of his largesse to the IRS.
The gifts are improper, could constitute or be perceived as bribes, and may violate
the honest services statute, 18 USC 1346. These gifts could also be considered taxable income and his failure to report them would constitute a clear violation of the tax code.
Thomas’ wife, Ginni’s big paydays from assorted right wing foundations and think tanks have been well-documented. Thomas did not disclose her earnings initially. He refused to acknowledge her involvement with Liberty Central, her political lobbying group. Thomas at fist claimed ignorance about the filing requirement, and after savage media exposure amended the forms.

Thomas was not ignorant of the requirement to disclose spousal income as he initially claimed. When he chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he dutifully filed his financial disclosure forms and that included his wife’s employment from 1987 to 1997. He continued to disclose income as a federal appeals court judge and for his first few years on the Supreme Court. Thomas also stated that his wife had no non-investment income. This was a falsehood. It was not a memory or ignorance of the law lapse. By failing to file, Thomas violated the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that requires all federal judges to file yearly financial disclosure forms including sources of income from their spouses. Making false statements on the forms can be prosecuted as a felony under the federal false statements statute, 18 USC 1001 — knowingly making false statements of material fact to a federal agency. In 2007, Congress increased the civil and criminal penalties for false income statement filings.

Then there’s the issue of conflict of interest. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010 that Thomas backed conferred “personhood” on corporations and allows them to ladle out any amount they want with virtually no reporting requirements directly to candidates and campaigns. Thomas did not disclose that the rightwing Citizens United Foundation, the driving force behind the case, spent as much as $100,000 on commercials that lambasted those senators that opposed his High Court nomination in 1991. Thomas ignored calls for him to recuse himself from the case.

Then there is the strong hint that Thomas perjured himself in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his court confirmation hearings in 1991 and that he compounded that by lying under oath to Congress during the hearings.
Thomas was asked directly by Utah senator Orrin Hatch during his confirmation hearings about Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct and whether he used sexually suggestive language. Thomas answered: “I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of a sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill, that I ever attempted to date her, that I ever had any personal sexual interest in her, or that I in any way ever harassed her.”

Thomas was emphatic, “If I used that kind of grotesque language with one person, it would seem to me that there would be traces of it throughout the employees who worked closely with me, or the other individuals who heard bits and pieces of it or various levels of it.” This was stated under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thomas’ sworn testimony was clearly contradicted even then in public statements by witnesses. The witnesses were not called to testify.
In 2010, Thomas’ apparent perjured testimony to Congress was back on the legal table when another Thomas intimate confirmed that he engaged in sexual harassment, was addicted to pornography, and talked incessantly and graphically about it and women.
It’s also clearly established that a public official — whether the president, presidential appointees or judges — can be punished for giving false information (and that’s any false information of any nature) to the House or Senate.

A legion of House Democrats has again demanded that Thomas be investigated by variously the Justice Department and the Judicial Conference. The strong suspicion is that there may even be more dubious ethics and legal violations that Thomas may have committed in the nearly three decades that he has been a public official. That makes it even more imperative that Thomas be put on the investigative hot seat. But if Thomas weren’t Justice Thomas that would have long since been done, and he’d likely be in jail.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Two articles are next to each other on the front page of a once mighty Los Angeles newspaper. They tell our sad story in their headlines and represent our lack of direction, priorities and values. In California, our budget woes may make us cut the school year yet shorter, and nationally we are sending troops and establishing a military presence in Australia.

This is not guns versus butter. This is guns versus our future. If our schools fail our children, if our dropout rate gets yet worse than near 50% from high school here in Los Angeles; if we continue to lay people off and cut our social safety-net, we should not be surprised that our income as a state sinks. Unemployed and underemployed people do not pay as much in either sales or income taxes as the fully employed. The state really doesn’t collect a lot of property tax revenue from foreclosed properties.

We cut social programs and schools but always have money to build prisons–and in fact spend far more to maintain each prisoner than each student. Well, maybe the children are not our future. Maybe it’s our criminals. Of course, if we educated our children and offered them jobs that made money, we might reduce the population of our prisons. But, hey, I’m a dreamer.

When the economy tanked, we still had money to buy tanks. We had money to bail out Wall Street. We had money to bail out banks. We gave it all away and demanded nothing back from them. So, they’re sitting on trillions. Meanwhile, in another part of the world, we continue to project power in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plenty of money for that. And now, even as we are leaving Iraq, we are planning on expanding our military foot print in the gulf, build more bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and keep our troops in the neighborhood. There will be no savings as Iraq winds down.

Then yesterday (or given that it was in Australia, maybe tomorrow) Obama announces that now that we have a little free time, he has noticed that we’ve been ignoring Asia. And what better way to say I notice you and value you than to do something that will annoy the Chinese by sending in the Marines? I’m sure we can afford this. I’m sure that 2,500 Marines will make the Australians feel safer and really shows those Chinese who is boss.

We have to ask however, that when all is said and done and spent, will there still be an America worth defending? We are in danger of becoming not simply fiscally bankrupt (from that we could recover) but morally bankrupt. That would be far more difficult to remediate. Guns or butter? Schools or foreign bases? Hope or fortress America?

Let’s act expensively and symbolically. Let’s make problems for no real purpose. Let’s spend the money we borrow from the Chinese to annoy the Chinese, but not help out our states, our schools our own people. Yeah, that’s a winning plan.

GOP presidential candidates have been loose lipped on any and every public policy issue imaginable. But suddenly they have all have lost their speech on the Penn State scandal. They have uttered barely a peep about the scandal. The closest that any name GOP figure has come to speaking out on the scandal is fast faded, non-candidate Sarah Palin who lambasted accused and indicted sexual predator Jerry Sandusky.

The scandal is seemingly made in heaven for the GOP to score moral talking points on. It’s chock full of their favorite themes on the perils of moral decay, and permissiveness, sexual deviancy, violence and the threat it poses to family and religious values. But as has so often been the case with the GOP when it’s one of their own that’s dumped on the legal and morals hot seat, mute silence quickly sets in. That’s been true with the dozens of sexual abuse, rape, child molestation, and sex harassment cases that legions of GOP political notables and boosters have been implicated in or jailed for over the past two decades. In the case of Penn State there’s an extra special reason for the GOP’s deafening silence. The culprit on the hot seat is Joe Paterno, a GOP made man.
But Paterno’s high place in the GOP celebrity pantheon goes much deeper than donating thousands to the party, his giving a seconding speech to George H W Bush at the 1988 GOP convention in New Orleans, his tout of W. Bush at a campaign rally at the York Expo Center in 2004, or even prepping his son Scott in his failed bid for a GOP congressional seat. Paterno’s unabashed enthusiasm for the GOP rose above and beyond the normal bounds of political propriety. Hs 1988 convention speech gave the first real glimpse of Paterno as the consummate GOP pitch man. The speech was less than three minutes and was only one of seven seconding speeches for Bush. Yet it was the one that drew headlines not because he gave it, but because in the words of reporters at the convention, he “ripped” the Democrats.

Bush campaign officials fell all over themselves gushing over Paterno’s speech. They excitedly called it “a great thing for us” and “a great thing for George Bush.” A handful of Pennsylvania Democratic state officials including then Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey screamed that Paterno was using his prestige and position at a state supported institution to spew partisan politics, and that it could even jeopardize state funding for a public university and have an adverse impact on the ability to raise private contributions. They accused him of trading on his name to blatantly boost the GOP. A defiant and unapologetic Paterno shrugged it off as much ado about nothing and said he would say what he pleased about a “guy I like very much.” Paterno had spoken, but the case wasn’t closed. Paterno couldn’t resist reminding the critics and the public that his tout of the GOP was “an honor” for the university and Pennsylvania.

Paterno didn’t stop there. He rushed to New Hampshire to campaign door to door for Bush and along the way endorsed a local Republican congressional candidate. In the next two decades Paterno kept a close eye on local and national GOP politics. GOP officials though ever protective of Paterno gave the stock answer that Paterno was not directly involved in party policy issues and decisions but rather was simply a celebrity endorser. But Paterno didn’t have to be involved in party politics or operations to have an impact. His name as a celebrity and sports icon was gold with an admiring public and that added priceless sheen and luster to the GOP locally and nationally.
Paterno certainly had a right to follow his convictions and endorse, campaign for, and bankroll GOP candidates. But his political right to be a GOP preppie was never the issue. The issue was the party that he went to the barricades for time and again. A party that has been the poster party for the past four decades of scandal, cronyism, corruption and most damaging of all, a party with a marked propensity to keep silent on racial and gender racist gaffes, digs, slander and abuse by GOP officials and notables. It’s been especially adept at the art of silence and the cover-up on scandals that embroil its own.
Paterno’s self admitted failure to “do more” as he put it to stop the abuse when his name, reputation, and the sports program that he put nearly five decades into turning into his personal fiefdom was in mortal danger of crashing down around him was a page straight out of the playbook the GOP on cover-up that it has so deftly turned into a studied art over the years. It is no accident then that the GOP presidential candidates could lose their tongue when one of their own is again on the moral firing line.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

I don’t know if the Democrats play a dangerous game, by shunning Obama, but it would be a no-no in the “Emily Post Guide to Political Sanctity,” had she ever penned one. It relates to an old expression, “nations have neither permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” And the same goes for politicians. They can’t shun Obama because they want to be good party people, good comrades and no one wants to yell “chicken” first.

Yet, Obama got himself in this pickle. One reason is that he is not assertive enough with Congress and foreign officials. I can understand the need to all get along, but bending too far has made some wonder whether he has a backbone. Another is that he has approached the Middle East with rose-colored glasses while looking at the Arabs and now sednign troops to Australia. And the third is bailing out those who little deserved it did not make him look very wise in retrospect, nor did it give the economy the shot in the arm it needed. And with his approval ratings tanking, he is treading water to keep his job. Interestingly enough, many of those polled said they like him but they don’t think he’s doing such a wonderful job, and I agree.

He might do a better job now that he has gone through a learning curve, though I don’t know if the voters and the unemployed will be so forgiving come election time.

Both left and right often make the same mistakes.We over interpret election victories as mandates and therefore overreach. We also, way too easily, form circular firing squads to shoot our own when they disappoint us. We both act as if the good were the mortal enemy of the perfect.

I understand the progressive’s disappointment, bordering on despair, with Obama. I know how they would like to be idealists and find someone who better represents their views. I also know that when significant numbers act on these noble impulses, they lose and lose, as Cheney used to say, “Big time!”

When I read and hear the various criticisms of Obama I’m often moved to laughter and tears (Physiologically they are very close). The right characterizes Obama as a screaming socialist, a man of the left and a secret hater of capitalism. The left characterizes him as a secret corporatist, beholden to moneyed interests, way too aggressive in the pursuit of wars and too diffident about civil rights, human rights and gay rights.

The right says he won’t cooperate or compromise and just rammed his agenda through Congress in the first two years. The left argues that he compromises too much, negotiates with himself and pre-surrenders on the important issues. Talk about the divide in our politics.

However, if the Occupy folks believe that a Republican president will more closely represent their politics and interests, they are delusional. If, on the other hand, they believe that the only way to accomplish radical change is to bring in the Republicans to so totally wreck the system that the left will inherit the mess, history shows they will only in the words of Proverbs, “inherit the wind.”

Both Marx and Mao believed that capitalism would be brought down by the contradictions in its excesses. There were even Communists in Weimar Germany who supported Hitler and not their own left. Their thought was that he would break the nation and that they would inherit it. Their slogan was Nach Hitler Uns–after Hitler us! This did not work out for them, Germany or the world.

The strategy of sabotaging your own–whether on the right or left–in the hopes of profiting from the wreckage is morally wrong and pragmatically doesn’t work. Perot elected Clinton while Nader Elected Bush. In an imperfect world with imperfect candidates smart Republicans will support Romney and not a third party and smart Democrats will support Obama and not sit on their hands and wallets.